An Open-Source exFAT Implementation Reaches v1.0

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Originally Posted by droidhacker

Distribution is distribution is distribution. It makes no difference if you pre-install it, supply physical media, or have people download it from the interwebz. Its still in violation of copyright/patent/etc.

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But if you get people do download the required binary (that was compiled by somebody else), then you aren't distributing.

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Originally Posted by droidhacker

Hum, gee, I wonder why nobody's ever thought of that before??? Truly so easy to circumvent all patent issues, all you need to do is build a simple system capable of downloading and installing something from the interwebz rather than shipping it pre-installed, then you can trade around all kinds of stuff, like wondoze, osx, free movies, free music, and free pr0n.

Duh... sorry, my friend, that's not how it works.
Distribution is distribution is distribution. It makes no difference if you pre-install it, supply physical media, or have people download it from the interwebz. Its still in violation of copyright/patent/etc.

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If the software is developed and distributed from servers outside of United Corporations of America, MS can't do s** about it. That's why Archlinux can ship software with mp3 decoders compiled in as it's a Canadian distro.

The SD card standard organization should have done a mechanism of indicating a file system, describing what file system is on the card instead of having this nonsense.

This way we can have both:
- for older systems you can use older file systems with less code change
- for newer systems you can use newer file systems with better features, better adapted for the use case.
- makes the standard simpler and easier to implement for hardware makers

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Originally Posted by plonoma

The SD card standard organization should have done a mechanism of indicating a file system, describing what file system is on the card instead of having this nonsense.

This way we can have both:
- for older systems you can use older file systems with less code change
- for newer systems you can use newer file systems with better features, better adapted for the use case.
- makes the standard simpler and easier to implement for hardware makers

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The filesystem makes zero difference, because you can always reformat it to whatever you like. It's just there for people who don't know how to do that, and the same people are not likely to care about what filesystem it is in the first place.

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Originally Posted by chithanh

What it doesn't have is being allowed to install inside a partition. UDF spec requires that the filesystem occupies the entire storage medium. But in practice, the operating systems ignore this restriction.

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Hello.
External media in all Windows versions is disallowed to be partitioned.
There seems to be some kind of a flag for the USB driver, which switches between "harddisk" and "usbdisk" modes.

Under Linux there is no such exception, but any usb drive with partitions will *not* be recognized by Windows.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Attach any USB disk to Windows and open Disk Management
2) Note, that you can't create partitions, regardless which FS.

1) Attach any USB disk to Linux and create at least one unformatted partition without filesystem.
2) Attach this USB disk to Windows and note that the drive will not be recognized.
3) If you delete the partitions, Windows will recognize the drive again and follow restriction 2 above.

Personally, I find the global adaption of JFFS2 would be more than adequate.

Windoze does recognize the first partition. I have a lot of sticks with fat32 as the first partition and ext* as the subsequent ones.

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Originally Posted by curaga

Windoze does recognize the first partition. I have a lot of sticks with fat32 as the first partition and ext* as the subsequent ones.

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Heh this is not always the case, my usb hardrive are not recognized in windows with 2 partitions in it. First one being fat and other being ext3. I have to use ext2ifs software for mounting my fat partition to windows. Maybe it has something to with fact that I have partitioned it under linux.

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Originally Posted by [Knuckles]

Even NTFS is better than exfat.
Support on all windows systems for the past 12 (?) years or more without patches that may or not be installed, read-only part of the linux kernel (and others), every decent distro ships ntfs-3g for full rw support, OSX can read it too, write support is in there somewhere but disabled by default, and it can also use ntfs-3g.

So really, why bother with exfat, if you can avoid it. Microsoft had a real chance to promote interoperability, and they decided against it. Again.

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I see that you have no idea how hard is to keep the OS X driver working :)

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Originally Posted by Redi44

I see that you have no idea how hard is to keep the OS X driver working :)

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This exFAT driver is – just like NTFS-3g – based on FUSE which means that this driver is no simpler to use under OSX than NTFS-3g.
UDF on the other hand works almost everywhere out of the box.

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Originally Posted by plonoma

The SD card standard organization should have done a mechanism of indicating a file system, describing what file system is on the card instead of having this nonsense.

This way we can have both:
- for older systems you can use older file systems with less code change
- for newer systems you can use newer file systems with better features, better adapted for the use case.
- makes the standard simpler and easier to implement for hardware makers

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I don't understand how this helps the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of devices currently in use.

I don't understand how adding cost and complexity to both the drive and the socket "makes the standard simpler and easier to implement". The modifications of which you speak would require an extra signal, which would entail another pin in the socket, another landing on the drive.

You seem to be forgetting that MOST of the SD sockets out there are mounted in VERY VERY DUMB EMBEDDED SYSTEMS. They are cameras and MP3 players and the like. They are NOT general purpose computers, they do NOT have endless RAM for more and more code and more and more file systems. These systems are TOTALLY MINIMAL and there is simply no room or development time or inclination or whatever to make changes like this that have very very little upside and lots and lots of downside.

And besides all that, WHO THE FUCK says you HAVE to put ONE SINGLE PARTITION on the drive??? SD cards are just plain generic block devices, you can partition them and put as many different file systems on them as you want. Heck you can just open the raw block device and treat it as one big file if it flips your switch.